It’s Fine

equal rights for women will never truly be achieved until we have more female noir detectives

So my husband is back on his medieval warfare and tactics special interest lately, and he was telling me about how so many battles were lost because the knights would just disobey orders and break ranks because they got too excited and just went full Leroy Jenkins. Prey drive switches on and they see somebody running and they just blank out and go.

Which seemed really dumb to me, like people couldn’t be that stupid, until I got walloped in the face by a memory from freshman year of college.

It’s almost 10pm in the dead of winter right before Finals, I’m out at college in a high altitude desert in the biggest city I’ve ever been in during my life. My dorm is on the second floor of one of the newest buildings, which are still surrounded by construction zones for the other new buildings going up. Just past the construction zones is one of the city’s major roads. There is still snow on the ground outside, the sidewalks are ice and rock salt, and the parking lot is a slush pile. (All of this is relevant in a minute I swear, stay with me here.)

We get a knock at the door. One of my roomies answers it. There’s 2 creepy looking muscle dudes asking for another roommate, E. E is creeped out and doesn’t want to go see them, but they won’t leave, insisting they see her and talk to her out in the hall. My spider senses are tingling, the social anxiety override kicks in, and I go full Mom Friend and ask them who they are and how they know her. And dudes just take off for the stairwell.

And I took off after them.

I need y’all to understand that I was an asthmatic at altitude in a mountain city in winter at night in shorts and a t-shirt and no shoes whatsoever, and I somehow made it down two flights of stairs, out the door, down the sidewalk, across a construction zone, across the parking lot, and halfway to the road screaming at two beardy dudebros twice my size to “get back here you little creeps”, all before I had consciously realized that I had left my apartment. Something about watching two creepy guys run for it triggered something in me, some latent instinct to Search and Destroy. Like Fight or Flight but I wasn’t the one being threatened, they were the ones doing the Flight, and I had this deep, ferocious need to FIGHT.

I full on blanked out, y’all. I literally have no memory of getting down the stairs or across the parking lot or anything at all until I was watching the headlights on the road thinking “wait, where are my shoes?” It’s a little black hole. I was in the apartment, they took off running, and then bam, there I was. It was like an out of body experience, I was hearing myself shout at them and thinking “I sound like such an idiot right now omg,” and then I realized What I Had Done.

Not only was it stupid, it was super dangerous. Even aside from all the environmental dangers, if they were some kind of kidnappers they could totally have snatched me. And yet there I was, barefoot in the snow and road salt with no phone, no inhaler, and I was still hollering after them like a dog on a chain when one of my roommates came down in boots and a coat to drag me back inside.

And honestly? I’m still miffed I never caught the guys. That was my takeaway from that incident.

So yes, I believe it now. People are so unbelievably dumb and the prey drive instinct is absolutely real.

also guys... take my advice. im thrusting it upon u im forcing u to take it.

ADVICE : go outside fr. go LOOK at things. SPEND a little money that youll regret in hindsight. maintain a little notebook and write about the things u see. click a photo fo trees and bugs and strangers u meet. GO OUTSIDE. no need to touch the grass u can also step on it and sit on it . eat well !

everytime dorian gets shy or shrinks away i think of this okay

No.11

not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’ for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker

We took the drunk train home.

They were all absolutely infatuated with him and whispering about how much they wanted to pet him and then shushing each other saying “no that’s rude you can’t! just leave him alone!” so I told them they can pet him if they want and they were absolutely overwhelmed with happiness, while simultaneously being very concerned for his well-being, continually asking if I was very sure that it was okay and that I should please please tell them if I need them to leave him alone.

Basically, it was a great ending to a VERY long day. Sometimes people are really great.

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His Red Eyes